The collection of protocols and applications commonly referred to as the World Wide Web (“Web”) is a widely used client-server architecture for transaction applications. The convenience of carrying on transactions with Web applications is leading to an increasing portion of the transactions persons engage in day-to-day being performed with Web applications.
Typically, transaction applications involve many steps each with its own page. The network user generally must interact must with each page of the transaction application. When such a multi-step user transaction application (hereinafter “MUTA”) is started by the user, they may not have expected the MUTA to require as many steps as it does, or some other activity may interrupt the user's ability to complete the MUTA at the current time. This is particularly true with increasingly popular platforms where, for instance, Web applications, are combined with televised entertainment. Such platforms are frequently known as “Enhanced TV” or “Interactive TV” (hereinafter “ITV”). In such a context, a viewer of a video program may be prompted by a Web resource enhancing the video program to initiate a transaction. However, the user may wish to return to viewing the video program quickly and not wish to spend the time to complete the transaction at that moment. Thus it would be desirable for a mechanism to exist that allowed the user to defer completion of such a transaction.
Related series of technologies include user registration systems. In a typical user registration system, a user provides information to the operator of, for instance, a Web application. The user may be able to pre-specify information that is relevant to a later interaction during the registration process. However, the registration information that is stored cannot provide information that would allow a user to return to the precise position in a later-initiated transaction where the user decided to defer completion. Put another way, while user data stored, for instance as part of a registration process, may be relevant to a later transaction and form part of the state of the transaction at any particular step, user registration data does not provide full state information for later-initiated transactions. Accordingly, stored registration data technologies are unable to provide a system for preserving state of a MUTA to allow deferred completion and resumption.
An additional aspect of conventional technologies is that conventional Web applications lack a convenient mechanism to defer completion at any point of a transaction. Many conventional electronic commerce applications operate on a ‘shopping cart’ model. In a typical ‘shopping cart’ model application, a user will interact with an ‘electronic store’ of some sort: browsing items, comparing product features, searching, etc., and then add items the user wishes to purchase to an electronic ‘shopping cart’. When the user wishes to complete their interaction at the ‘electronic store,’ the user so indicates and the items ‘in’ their ‘shopping cart’ are processed to consummate the transaction. Many ‘shopping cart’ applications provide the feature that a user can return to their ‘shopping cart’ with the state preserved, i.e., the items they have previously ‘in’ their ‘shopping cart’ will still be there. However, the ‘shopping cart’ is but one part in an overall shopping application: users do not have the ability to return directly to other points in the overall process, for example a particular page providing information about a product's features. As the type and nature of Web transactions becomes more complex, and as less sophisticated users carry on such transactions, a need has arisen for a general solution to the problem of allowing a user to defer completion of MUTAs at any step in the overall interaction and resume the interaction at that stage at a later time.